Modern institutions appear as external structures despite being mere effects of practices

Evidence

The second consequence of disciplinary power, the one that Michel Foucault does not discuss, yet the more important for understanding the peculiarity of capitalist modernity, is that at the same time as power relations become internal in this way, and by the same methods, they now appear to take the form of external structures. … Of course this apparatus has no independent existence. It is an effect produced by the organised distribution of men, the coordination of their movement, the partitioning of space, and the hierarchical ordering of units, all of which are particular practices. There was nothing in the new power of the army except this distributing, arranging, and moving. But the order and precision of such processes created the effect of an apparatus apart from the men themselves, whose structure orders, contains, and controls them. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 28

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The central ‘peculiarity’ of capitalist modernity that Mitchell claims exceeds Foucault — that internal, productive power simultaneously appears as reified external structure — is a dense, paradigm-shifting point worth sitting with.
• SEED: The Egyptian army as ‘artificial machine’ that appears greater than its parts could anchor an essay on reification — how the products of process get misread as pre-existing containers.
• XREF: Parallels the ‘social capital as unanalyzed placeholder’ insight from SocialCapitalCreation — both about how constructed phenomena get treated as pre-existing substances. — connects to: Spurious universal entities are produced by unrepresentative social institutions — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 733; Long-standing village institutions function as dynamic hybrids of modern and traditional elements. — Emil Sandström and Ann-Kristin Ekman and Karl-Johan Lindholm, Commoning in the periphery – The role…, 60; Institutions persist by making analogies that make their practices appear natural. — Emil Sandström and Ann-Kristin Ekman and Karl-Johan Lindholm, Commoning in the periphery – The role…, 70 (+3 more)